Women adult students face particular constraints when pursuing degrees. This paper uses focus group data to explore the educational pathways, barriers, and supports of women students. Women's educations are shaped by personal and structural gendered forces, including family, economic, and workplace issues. Women report conflict over short-term…

Dispelling historical narratives in composition and rhetoric that largely depict nineteenth-century student compositions as "vacuous" themes, this archival study examines women's compositions at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary as complex generic hybrids, in which the composition is fused with common social and dialogic forms. By focusing…

The authors describe an interdisciplinary course team-taught by an economist and a sociologist. Historically mindful of the less than amicable relationship between these disciplines, these colleagues developed a course that attempted to illuminate the different perspectives of economics and sociology in relation to selected health themes. Such a…

The history of coeducation in U.S. higher education is explored through an analysis of a database containing information on all institutions offering four-year undergraduate degrees that operated in 1897, 1924, 1934, or 1980, most of which still exist today. These data reveal surprises about the timing of coeducation and the reasons for its…

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the relationship between gender and female leadership styles in a single-sex academic institution in Saudi Arabia. Design/methodology/approach: Essentially, a qualitative research approach that utilised a single case-study methodology was adopted. As part of this research, seven in-depth semi-structured…

Opening in 1837, Wesleyan Female Seminary became by 1855 one of the small number of colleges for women in the United States. The question is to what extent Wesleyan was a true college as that word was understood at the time, along with the wider issue of what constituted a college as the concept became transformed during the nineteenth century. In…

This study examined the founding of the New Jersey College for Women as an exemplary case that illustrates important social and political issues regarding women's access and acceptance to higher education during the Progressive Era. The New Jersey College for Women was founded as a public women's college that was affiliated with the state's…

In this article, I test claims made about rhetorical education for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining Florida State College for Women (FSCW), one of eight public women's colleges in the South. I recover the voices of instructors and students by looking both at the interweaving strands of literature, journalism,…

The global community, from UNESCO to NGOs, is committed to promoting the status of women in science, engineering and technology, despite long-held prejudices and the lack of role models. Previously, when equality was not firmly established as a key issue on international or national agendas, women's colleges played a great role in mentoring female…

Recent educational policies have altered scholastic experience. It is the contention of the authors that contemporary school experience may therefore, for some individuals, be distressing. This study is concerned with the identification of stress-related behaviours of sixth-form pupils within female single-sex, selective, scholastic environments.…

Scholars have long debated the complicity of Southern white women after the Civil War in helping create a racialist and racist regional identity and denying or delaying civil rights for African Americans. These studies have largely focused on the activities of elite white women property owners, club members, and writers. Yet few scholars have…

This study uses case study analysis to explore the ways that Spelman College, a historically Black women's college, promotes the attainment of African American women in STEM fields. Although limited to one institution, the findings shed light on the ways that institutional characteristics, policies, and practices may mitigate the barriers that…

This paper describes a study of online discussion forums as tools for promoting higher-order thinking. The study was carried out in a women's university in the United Arab Emirates. Data, in the form of online discussion forum transcripts, were collected over a 20-week semester and were analysed according to a model developed by Garrison,…

This study utilized a data set of categorical responses measuring the gender role views of students (N = 701) from a prestigious, Midwestern, all-male, Catholic high school. Incongruence between student self-perceptions and the realities of gender role miseducation and the embracement of sexist ideology were readily apparent. Findings suggest that…

Sociologist Mabel Agnes Elliott was elected the fourth president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 1956-1957 and was the first woman to hold this position. She was an anti-war activist, a feminist and a creative and diligent writer. Yet she experienced many challenges. The Federal Bureau of Investigation kept an active file on…